Terre Chartrand is a food sovereignty activist, seed keeper, artist and traditional beader who works with urban Indigenous youth in addressing erasure of Indigenous people in Southern Ontario. She is also a proud auntie to her community! It is an honour to get the opportunity to hear her perspective, stories and words of wisdom.
This speech accompanies an interview conducted by Rozh in the 25th print issue of Rebel Youth – Jeunesse Militante. It was originally prepared for a solidarity event in January 2020.
“Aaniin, Nanaboozhoo.
This is a message from Terre Chartrand. I am a Kitchesipirini Algonquin kwe with mixed Acadian French and Welsh roots. My family is from Northern Ontario, I grew up in the south of the province near Lake St. Clair. I have lived in Waterloo Region on and off for 20 years.
I have sent this message in today to be read as I cannot make it to stand with you due to illness. I will be better soon, but the action is today, and our words and presence with each other are important. I cannot place my body there, so please accept my words read to you.
I had a hard time coming to a subject that I would speak to with regards to what is happening at Wet’suwet’en and Unist’ot’en. This isn’t for a lack of things to address. I have spent weeks every summer on Vancouver Island with aging relations and have flown out across smoke so dense that mountains are invisible, and then so dense that they are invisible even when you are standing under them. I have driven down roads through small cities where the mountains around were clear on the trip out, but engulfed in flames only a couple hours later. I have seen the devastation of environmentally precious places because of the impact of our environmental carelessness.
I could also have spoken about how Wet’suwet’en First Nations is a community on the Highway of Tears, and is a community that is sadly very well acquainted with the tragedy of losing girls and women, missing or found dead, along a roadway that has claimed so many. I would mention and talk at length about how when resource exploitation happens, camps for the almost entirely male workforce are set up, and these places become a hotbed for the exploitation and trafficking of Indigneous women, and that the communities where these man camps are created also see massive spikes in abuse and domestic murders in general. Resource exploitation, and exploitation of women and girls go hand in hand.
I could also have talked about what unceded territory means, and what it is to have a foreign power send military forces into a space that they do not govern. I can beg you to think about how you would feel if a pipeline was placed across your backyards, through your kids’ schools, across the moraines and aquifers that you count on, through your fields and food systems, across the markets, and cutting through your graveyards and hospitals. I could try, but explaining the Indigenous connection to the land is not something that is done with words, and it is almost impossible to position it in a world where people experience “outside” as an annoyance or exotic piece of travel or tourism.
But what I settled on is to talk to you, my fellow relations who live in Waterloo Region, about how important it is to support our western relations through acts of solidarity.
Indigenous people across Turtle Island are the last real protection against climate change and a world that is becoming increasingly uninhabitable to all of our relations. In this year alone, we have seen the listing of several large herbivores as endangered or extinct. We are killing off not only the honey bees that create a sweetened treat, but we are also destroying our native bees and pollinators who are the powerhouses of food production that every creature relies upon. We are seeing the mass disappearances of insects, and the countrysides are becoming silent and as monolithic as the monocultures that are planted to support a broken system of agriculture which contributes to the decimation of the creatures our food systems need to keep us all alive.
We here are not protected from our own lack of stewardship. We here support bottled water industries that strip away our ground water and leave us with months-long droughts in the summer. And then we watch as end-of-season deluges wash away our foods, causing blight and rot and making that which we carefully tended through drought now inedible. We bemoan our winters, which have been protection for us and our plant relations against disease caused by southern insects such a ticks, non-native destructive invaders like Emerald Ash Borers, and funguses and moulds kept in check by our deep frosts that jeopardize our entire food systems.
I live reliant on the land. I live with foods that I grew in the summer sustaining my family throughout the year. And even if you never set foot into a garden or field, even if you have never touched a food-producing plant, so do you. Our entire food system relies on a worldwide connectivity of ecosystems that work in a balance to support all life — from the flyers, to the four legged, to the swimmers.
What is happening in Wet’suwet’en feels far away. But we are deeply connected to the coast. The pipeline that they are opposing running through their lands not only passes through rare and precious ecosystems, but terminates at Haida Gwaii. These ancient forests are some of the last deep carbon sinks left in the world. The oceans as living spaces full of creatures are also being shown to be major carbon sinks as well. With the increase of fossil fuels traversing the land and terminating in places where it is loaded onto tankers to cross the sea, we are increasingly putting the sanctity of these spaces at risk. This places us all at risk. These pipeline builders and supporters — every Canadian who is not actively taking a stand in support of Indigenous opposition — are complicit in the destruction of the environments we need to survive.
Canada is ranked second for carbon production per capita, only a touch behind the USA, and leagues ahead of every other country in the world. Canada, for its low population and high carbon output, is one of the worst offenders in the world for destroying our ability to see more generations of our own species survive. We also speak a whole lot about decolonization here as a romantic concept whereby folk are finding themselves in some kind of appropriative back-to-the-earth movement. The reality is that we are entering times where survival will be stretched as we kill off everything around us. When insects die off, it is only a matter of time before everything that relies on systems where we are all interconnected become so precarious that we find ourselves as well at a position of deep struggle.
Today I send words to support my relations at Wet’suwet’en in their struggle and see in them some of the last vanguards protecting that which we not only love, but rely upon for our survival. I send my love to my relations who they are protecting – the forests and everything that lives in them. I send my love to the land itself and the waters and seas that now require us to do better more than ever before.
Chi miigwetch for listening to my words. I am with you in solidarity.”